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Forum rules
This forum is meant for general questions about the usability of OCS from an everyday user's perspective: conference managers, presenters, and directors are welcome to post questions here, as are librarians and other support staff. We welcome general questions about the role of OCS and how the workflow works, as well as specific function- or user-related questions.

What to do if you have general, workflow or usability questions about OCS:

1. Read the documentation. We've written documentation to cover from OCS basics to system administration and code development, and we encourage you to read it.

2. take a look at the tutorials. We will continue to add tutorials covering OCS basics as time goes on.

3. Post a question. Questions are always welcome here, but if it's a technical question you should probably post to the OCS Technical Support subforum; if you have a development question, try the OCS Development subforum.

First of all, I would like to congratulate the people of PKP for the development and continued support of this invaluably useful set of software and all people who have contributed to PKP for their part in making this software great. I came across the PKP software collection by chance and I was immediately attracted by the clean, professional and streamlined design and its wealth of features.I would also like to thank James MacGregor personally for creating an account for me in PKP Forum and thus solving the problem I had registering.

Cretan Studies Association, the non-profit, cultural and research institution in which I'm participating, has scheduled two conferences for this summer, one for the popular oral culture of Crete and Cyprus and one for the Greek poets Angelos Sikelianos and Odysseas Elytis, and OCS seemed to be an excellent and very powerful solution for the tasks of collecting abstracts and presentations for the conference and making them available in a functional and appealing form. In fact, for the purposes of these two specific conferences, which are mostly built around invited presentations, OCS carries many features which we will probably not be using. Alternatively, we were considering of making use of the institution's main, Joomla based, webpage, by implementing a document management solution like Docman and/or a specially design registration-submission form.However, I thought that it is better to plan ahead and I just didn't like not having the option available, if needed. Open Conference Systems is of course available, but it was important for us to have the platform localized, and unfortunately Greek locale was not available. A specific circumstance gave me the time opportunity of translating the necessary OCS files myself and I took it.

So here is the greek translation of the necessary OCS locale files: (for safety, always check the newest post in this thread for the latest, most up to date translation)

Here is an updated translation of the en_US locale files for OCS...You must know that this update assumes you have implemented the changes in this report/patch http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6397It also includes some translation optimization, to render meaning more conciselyAll future translation updates will be built on the basis of those changes...so If you use this translation version, you MUST implement the above changes.

I have translated all .xml files inside OCS/locale, all files inside OCS/lib/pkp/localeexcept "countries.xml" and "currencies.xml" (already translated) & the various locale files inside the OCS/plugins folderEDIT - FEB 4th 2011I have also included the Greek locale files for TinyMCE, downloaded from the editor's website...I have also translated the hover text for the font size plugin. There was no locale file for that, so I had to edit the "fontController.js" and convert it from ANSI to UTF-8 without BOMMost of the files within the OCS/lib/pkp/locale directory were already translated into Greek, but I went ahead and translated them from scratch because:a. I wanted to have a more uniform translation across OCSb. I found some sparse errors with the existing translation c. Translating the files directly instead of cross-checking between the existing greek and the english locale actually proved less time-consumingd. The existing translation must have been based on an earlier OCS/OJS release and there were message-keys missing from most filese. The grid.xml file was not included in the set of filesI was actually bored of the task of dealing with "countries.xml" and "currencies.xml", even though the former has additional strings compared to the en_US version.

I should also point out that the translation was based on the en_US locale files (with a little help from the french and italian locales for clarification and confirmation purposes), meaning that the greek locale files are now updated and support the most recent version of OCS to date.

2. What was the approach used?

Translating is never easy, even if the vocabulary itself does not present difficulties. The difficulties are rather morphological and semantic and, more precisely, they arise from the combination of these two elements. There are, also, some specific difficulties and concerns when translating from English into Greek, which are even more accentuated when dealing with software translations, where terms can be isolated and mixed randomly (from the translator's point of view) and different terms from different parts of one or more language files can be brought together in the actual working version of the software in a way that the translator cannot know before-hand, thus, lacking an immediate perception of the specific context. But for these difficulties to "translate" into translation errors, some specific syntactical and grammatical differences, hinted above, must also come into play.So here are a couple of points on issues which might have brought about the more obvious and more difficult to prevent translation (where guessing the context becomes a crucial factor) and which have determined grammatical choices for the translation, which in turn can have stylistic or semantic consequences perhaps not fitting to everyone's taste and judgement:

1) English is quite flexible, meaning that a single term in its specific form can be used to refer to many differing terms. For example, "completed" could refer to a submission, to many submissions, to registration(s), to text field(s) etc. In Greek, the same word would differentiate grammatically depending on the gender, the singular or the plural form of the word to which it refers.I was generally able to deal with these problems (correctly I believe) drawing on the immediate context. However, the immediate context (preceding/anteceding text, or the coding of the message-keys themselves) does not always help and there are also occasions where following those leads would actually be misleading. So there are bound to be some instances of mistaken translation, and if it is proved there are none, then this would be solely the product of luckWith the above description, I believe I have also sufficiently hinted to the fact thatI have not tested the translation on a working OCS site(edit - February 2011: The translation has now been widely tested, but I could still have missed certain typographical errors and improvements could still be possible). I believe, exactly because of the above difficulties, that this is an absolutely necessary step in finalizing the translation, in order to prevent errors (especially because these might most probably appear in the seemingly simplest of cases) or confusing messages.

But because I have taken much time dealing with the major task of the translation (and because I adopted a "bottoms up" approach to it, leaving my eyes aching a bit) and because I will not be using OCS extensively in the most immediate future and in its full width of functions, I will probably not be able to single out these potential translation problems. So, I will be needing the help and input of greek-speaking users of OCS.Moving on...

2) English, because of its flexibility, is advantageous when it comes to producing short messages conveying a specific meaning. In Greek, it almost invariably takes more (and I might also add longer) words in order to specify the meaning and reference of that same message. This can become a serious problem in cases where the design and layout of a software program is/might be based on implicit presuppositions about the area taken up by text. I have tasted this bitter experience with phpbb, phpbb styles, Joomla, Joomla extensions etc, where it often happens that when one switches to the greek translation, things suddenly go out of bounds, overlap, take up new lines or just make everything look weird by taking up more space etc.

As I said, I have not yet tested this translation on a working OCS site (edit - February 2011: The translation has now been widely tested, but I could still have missed typographical errors and improvements could still be possible), but with this concern in mind I have made some grammatical and syntactical choices which on occasions could make the translation appear rigid, maybe not immediately clear and/or scholarly (please do not read this as an ambition on my part) and/or idiosyncratic:

2. a) Idiosyncrasies- Instead of using the imperative mood and active verbal forms, I have used nouns, signifying function, e.g. "προσθήκη" (addition) instead of "προσθέστε" (add).- I have used many participles, e.g. "ανατεθειμένη" ("assigned"), instead of "έχει ανατεθεί"- By choosing nouns instead of verbs, I have managed to avoid the use of articles in these short messages, but I have also managed to produce sequences of nouns connected by genitive case. The combination of the above do make up a more rigid translation for the sake of brevity and, at times, maybe at the expense of clarity.

- Based on the hierarchy of roles in OCS, I have translated a couple words different from or contrary to the usual translation of these terms in Greek. "Manager" is translated as "Διευθυντής" (and "management" - where it refers directly to the manager's actions - as "διεύθυνση") and "Director" as "Επιμελητής".- I have translated "archive" as "ομάδα αρχείων" in order to distinguish it from "αρχείο" used for "file"

I have mumbled a lot, I know...I just wanted to make some things clear and inform others adequately with the intent of making the best possible finalized translation.

I don't expect many typographical errors to be found, since I have checked each and every line carefully after completing the translation, but if you find any error, of any kind, no matter how great or small, or if you have a better idea about the translation of some messages, or about the translation of terms across the locale files, please reply to this thread indicating the directory location, the name of the file, the specific line and its content (including the message key).

I have found that opening the files in Notepad++ and searching within and across the contents of the files is a good way of locating errors and homogenizing the translation.

Last edited by georgeKapsomenos on Fri Feb 18, 2011 6:38 am, edited 18 times in total.

I've been translating the plugins' locale files and I have come across what seems to be an error in the US English translation, in that the message keys are different but their contents are the same...

<message key="plugins.importexport.native.import.error.paperCoverageGeoLocaleUnsupported">An papergeographical coverage was provided for the paper<message key="plugins.importexport.native.import.error.paperCoverageChronLocaleUnsupported">An paper geographical coverage was provided for the paper

I have checked a large part of the translation on working site, I have made any corrections and improvements possible and I have also included in the package the Greek locale files for TinyMCE.The archive can be extracted in the root OCS installation folder and it will place the greek locale files in the appropriate folders, since their structure has been replicated to allow for easy updating/installing and simplify the server upload process by having a single archive only, instead of uploading tens of files through ftp...

I've been translating the plugins' locale files and I have come across what seems to be an error in the US English translation, in that the message keys are different but their contents are the same...

<message key="plugins.importexport.native.import.error.paperCoverageGeoLocaleUnsupported">An paper geographical coverage was provided for the paper<message key="plugins.importexport.native.import.error.paperCoverageChronLocaleUnsupported">An paper geographical coverage was provided for the paper

And please accept our thanks for providing this translation to the community. I will ensure that it is included with the upcoming 2.3.4 release of OCS, which should happen this month or early next. This is a valuable contribution to the community, and I am sure that it will be appreciated by many users.

And please accept our thanks for providing this translation to the community. I will ensure that it is included with the upcoming 2.3.4 release of OCS, which should happen this month or early next. This is a valuable contribution to the community, and I am sure that it will be appreciated by many users.

Cheers, James

Thanks a lot James....I hope it will come useful too. I've tried to be as thorough as possible and I will keep updating and optimizing the translation as I work with it. A small clarification...in the bug report you said:

I do have a question, though: do we support TinyMCEtranslations/locale modifications, or do we only ship the stock TinyMCE code?If the latter, I can suggest to George that he may be able to send his localechanges to the TinyMCE folks, and we might be able to otherwise host themsomewhere here and link to them from http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs-languages.

If I understood what you said correctly, I must point out that I did not translate the TinyMCE langs file myself...the translation included in this archive was downloaded from the TinyMCE website. I edited the first message in this post to state that, but it should have been repeated in my last message, where it would not get lost within the long text.What I did was I simply added these files in the appropriate folder structure so that they would be placed in the appropriate folder when the files are extracted.

The reason why I did this is explained inthis thread here in the forums. Having greek as primary locale, I noticed that for the fields that were not translated in Greek (like the TinyMCE hover text over the editor's buttons, or the text in its help pop-up) the key-codes were displayed instead.This could be cured in two different ways as I see it:1) By including a translation - or linking to it2) By setting a default "fall-back" language (e.g. en_US) for the display of the untranslated message-keys, instead of having the code display there.

Since I found the way to do it, I opted for the first solution.

Nice to hear that the new version is coming up...I guess I will familiarize myself with the software using a demo installation and move to the new release as soon as it is out. I like starting "clean"

Thanks for the clarifications! Unfortunately, I do not know if we have the resources to keep the TinyMCE plugin up-to-date with all available languages, but as you point out the locale files are there for others to download themselves. Of course, we do keep the TinyMCE plugin itself relatively up-to-date with their latest stable version, so when they add a language fall-back option it will appear in our software. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.

Also, a quick note -- it appears that I was a little over-hasty in suggesting that we'll be releasing a new version of OCS soon. It turns out that we will be holding off on an OCS release until a later date, so you should likely move ahead with the version that is currently available. Don't forget to take a look at that version's Recommended Patches page!

jmacgreg wrote:Also, a quick note -- it appears that I was a little over-hasty in suggesting that we'll be releasing a new version of OCS soon. It turns out that we will be holding off on an OCS release until a later date, so you should likely move ahead with the version that is currently available. Don't forget to take a look at that version's Recommended Patches page!

Cheers, James

Thanks for the notice....

It would be nice to start fresh, but actually I had already decided to go ahead and set up the site with the existing version, because I do have some time available right now , but it would be difficult to squeeze this in the timetable in a month from now...

I am however quite perplexed by the patches...I came across this page in the other thread https://github.com/pkp/ocs which evidently hosts the latest changes to the software...Maybe I am getting it wrong, but is there a way to download all these updated files as an archive, much like the one available in the ocs page? The history list of updates since the last release is too long to be done by hand...

The version of Git you see in OCS is really for development only -- a lot of changes go into it, and aren't necessarily tested, so it can be unstable and is definitely not recommended for production use.

Regarding the application of patches: do you have command-line access to your server, or are you having to apply these patches manually? When we update any installation we host with these recommended patches, we do so with one command. First, we download all the recommended patches to a specific directory, for example /home/jmacgreg/ocs/2.3.3-1/patches. And then we run the following command from the OCS web directory:

Actually, we may eventually implement a stable checkout in Git that could be used to keep stable installs up-to-date. I say this because we're discussing doing so for our own hosted journals and conferences. If that's the case, I'll make sure that the Git documentation is updated to say how to do this.

Actually, we may eventually implement a stable checkout in Git that could be used to keep stable installs up-to-date. I say this because we're discussing doing so for our own hosted journals and conferences. If that's the case, I'll make sure that the Git documentation is updated to say how to do this.

Here is an updated translation of the en_US locale files for OCS...You must know that this update assumes you have implemented the changes in this report/patch http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6397It also includes some translation optmization, to render meaning more concisely

All future translation updates will be built on the basis of those changes...so If you use this translation version, you MUST implement the above changes.